FIRST HEARING FOR AN EARLY DEBUSSY PIANO TRIO

By HAROLD C. SCHONBERG

Published: September 30, 1984

Claude Debussy went to Russia in 1880 as the personal pianist of Nadejda von Meck, the wealthy widow who was Tchaikovsky's patron. While there he composed a piano trio. Its composition never was a secret, and it is listed in standard reference works. The trouble is that nobody had ever heard the work; the manuscript had disappeared. But a few years ago the first movement surfaced in Paris, was auctioned and now is in the possession of the Morgan Library in New York.

The very first recording of the piece has recently been made, by the Western Arts Trio (Brian Hanly, violin; David Tomatz, cello, and Weiner Rose, piano) on Laurel LR 127. The Debussy Trio in G major lasts a little under 11 minutes, and the remainder of the disk is filled with Dvorak's big F minor Trio (Op. 65).

The Debussy piece is juvenalia. You can have a lot of fun putting it on the turntable and asking your learned friends who the composer is. Nothing in the music suggests Debussy. It is sweet, sentimental and sugared; it verges on the salon; it has some of the hothouse characteristics of Massenet. As the work of one of the supreme composers and innovators of musical history, the G major Trio has importance, if only to demonstrate that the great Debussy did not arrive on the scene fully formed. It is a curiosity that Debussy lovers will want, if only to round out their collections.

Dvorak's superb F minor Trio is always worth hearing. He and Brahms were the two major late-Romantic composers of chamber music; and while Brahms was more the philosopher, with greater intellectual power, some of Dvorak's chamber music quintets have a lovely, nationalistic, melodic quality that never ceases to enchant. With him, as with Dr. Johnson's philosopher, happiness was always breaking in. This F minor Trio is a work of more rugged strength than most of Dvorak's other chamber music, but it, too, has the sunshine so characteristic of the Bohemian composer.

The Dvorak, and the Debussy, receive competent performances. But the Western Arts Trio is not distinguished for tonal suavity. The fortissimo octave passages for violin in the first movement are not models of their kind, and the cellist produces a somewhat nasal sound. For the best available recording of the F minor Trio, one turns to the polished Beaux Arts Trio performance in the Philips album of all four Dvorak trios.

Enrique Granados lives mostly through his piano music, songs, and his one opera, ''Goyescas.'' But he did compose chamber music, and the first recording of his Piano Quintet in G minor has been issued, played by Thomas Rajna and the Alberni Quartet (Musical Heritage Society MHS 4906Y). The three-movement quintet is a short piece, about 15 minutes long, and Mr. Rajna, a fine Hungarian-born pianist now living in England, fills out the record with some unfamiliar piano pieces by Granados.

Granados was one of the Spanish nationalists, but there is very little nationalism in this early (1898) example of his work. The music looks back to Schumann and Mendelssohn, and basically this is little more than a student effort in which Granados was determined to show that he could handle classic forms. Like the Debussy Trio, it carries no hints of the composer-to-be. The best movement is the second, with its plaintive melody evocative of folk music. Otherwise the style is international. But the piece does have a few attractive moments and receives a smooth performance.

Among the piano solos, there is a lush, sexy ''A la Cubana'' and an amusing ''Aparicion.'' The recorded sound is bright and clear. Originally this disk was released in England in 1977.

In recent years musicians have been looking once again at the Harvard Classicists, that group of American composers around the turn of the century who worked in or around Boston and were determined to establish the German style as the American norm. They were honest, they were sincere, they were admirable technicians, they were powerful in their day, and they throttled any real attempts toward the direction of an authentic American nationalism. One of the most famous of the Harvard Classicists was Arthur Foote, and three admirable musicians - Joseph Silverstein, violin; Jules Eskin, cello, and Virginia Eskin, piano - have combined forces for the Trio No. 2 in B flat (Op. 11), the Three Character Pieces for Violin and Piano, and the Three Pieces for Cello and Piano (Northeastern NR 206).

Foote worked in the tradition of Germanic late Romanticism, and within his limitations he was very good. His Trio in B flat, composed in 1908, has many fine things going for it; the piece is well made, idiomatically written for the instruments, pleasantly melodic. Indeed, it has everything but individuality. Brahms, Mendelssohn and Schumann were the specters in Foote's attic, and they haunted everything he composed. The three violin pieces of 1886 are especially Brahmsian. The cello pieces of 1882, on the other hand, suggest Mendelssohn.

Yet this music deserves an honorable place in the American canon. It is something equivalent to the Hudson River school of painting: derivative, yes, but also part of our heritage. One can accept and even admire the Foote pieces for what they are, and also lament the irony of the Harvard Classicists' derision and suppression of a composer like Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who to them was cheap and superficial but who in reality composed some music of infinitely more originality. Anyway, these Foote pieces receive elegant, poised performances by Mr. Silverstein and the Eskins; and the recorded sound is unusually faithful - as good as anything you are going to hear on disk recordings.